I work in exactly the type of school this describes, with exactly these kids. I’m genuinely awed by the hubris it requires to just plow ahead with advice/theories about their advantages vs. disadvantages despite having no clue whatsoever what they’re talking about. It makes me genuinely angry. This person can take their theories and shove them up their ass, until they bother spending time in my shoes and really coming face-to-face with the profound systemic and otherwise deep long-term issues kids in this environment have to confront… just to make it to tomorrow. While navigating being a fucking teenager.
It wasn't all as bad as that, not all of the time, but that characterizes much of it.
You know where & how I "escaped"? With dumb luck and public University scholarships & federal grants. The dumb luck was some quirk of genetics that put enough horsepower in my brain that I could get away with awful learning habits. So I learned fast enough that grades & test scores needed for scholarships & grants allowed me to significantly cut back on the low-skill job hours. Then during college I learned enough that I got a semi-skilled job during the end of my college years, and went on from there.
I've done the research on populations of kids that come from these backgrounds vs. others, and success rates are shitty. Sure, when I dig into the qualitative side I usually see a bit of determination on the part of those who were successful but there's always a lot of dumb luck too.
This genre of pontificating that amounts to "Anyone can do it if they just try hard enough!" completely ignores the fact that the ability to try is itself highly influenced by outside factors beyond an individual or family's control. Problems of this sort can't be solved merely by attempts to motivate the individuals, they have to be accompanied by environmental changes and interventions.
Edit: resisting peer pressure shouldn’t be worried about because it’s “the spice of life”? Yikes
The author seems to have put in a lot of thought. And would be open to putting in more thought if you illustrated where he is incorrect or missing info. Otherwise the content is appealing to a lot of people.
That's sort of the definition of hubris. Coming to a topic they don't have anywhere near enough knowledge but assuming they know it all because they put some thought into it.
> genuinely awed by the hubris it requires to just plow ahead
that tone sounded more like hubris plus other expletives.
Parent didn’t say so explicitly, but there’s really no blog post you can write that is “how to escape from poverty as a teen in high school.” Thus, the problems with this one are not fixable. Off top:
* what’s the opening line of Anna Karenina, again? There are so many disparate challenges that poor kids can face that are more urgent than “get good exercise and send cold emails for jobs” that you couldn’t even fit them in their own book.
* even writing the blog post at all assumes these kids are reading hacker news which is, uh, cavalier. there are zillions of people hawking advice that these kids would need to sift through to even decide to follow this blog. Parents, friends, teachers, influencers, Andrew fucking Tate are all prescribing life strategies, why would they listen to your blog? Moreover, if you’re an impoverished kid who has somehow found HN and for some reason values its advice, you’re already on a better track than your peers, and you likely don’t need the advice!
* in fact, this blog is anti-advice for these people. Probably the single most valuable decision I made in my youth was to always refuse all peer pressure no matter what until I was out of my hometown. Peer pressure is INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS for these kids. They’re not Brock Turner, they’re not getting off easy and free because of daddy. one mistake can derail their whole lives. To read this guy say “don’t worry about peer pressure, it’s the spice of life” frankly pisses me off.
The real answer for these kids, again, is to get lucky until we get our shit to get as a country to make life less treacherous and unforgiving for those with less means. Unpopular here on HN, I guess, but the US is not a meritocratic libertarian tech utopia, some situations don’t have a reliable self-directed escape strategy, and not everything can be fixed by the perfect blog post.
edit: also the audacity to be like “here are some advantages of being underprivileged that you can leverage” is its own headache entire… “you won’t have to unlearn as many wrong ideas about the world”? Absolute nonsense
> I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories.
doesn't that somewhat justify the anger of the parent comment (who presumably "knows enough")?
If the author doesn't know enough about the topic, why the need to pontify? They could just stfu and have an opinion in topics on which they do have meaningful contributions. Not everyone needs to have an opinion on everything.
The parents are dysfunctional people churning out the next generation of dysfunctional people. It’s an intergenerational cycle that is nearly impossible to break.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36630576
Would also be interested to hear from anyone else who's taught at or attended a high school that's poor or in a rough area, re: those questions.
I’m one of the kids that “made it” out of these situations and it took me until I was over 40 and making FAANG money to START thinking in terms other than “not being like my dad” or “ending up poor”.
My longterm plan was “to be an electrician or work with computers.” Which was the plan I formed in 1st grade. (It took until high school to realize I meant EE not electrician, but that’s how little the actual plan mattered.)
> preserving your safety in some way
Even a comment as small as this is assuming a lot in poor areas. The only safety I had was in my own head or in my STEM classes because I could immerse myself in them enough to forget about life outside them.
Look up the problems associated with complex-ptsd, childhood neglect and parentification.
It was all about racing as hard as possible away from where I was, not about looking forward in any way. For most of my twenties my timeframe in planning was weeks or months if I felt confident.
I just got lucky I got hooked on computers and had a couple teachers that praised me for that and math.
In fact, I nearly dropped out in 9th grade to work at a Burger King so I had access to some kind of money. Instead I called CPS and moved in with my narcissistic mother who was at least financially stable. But it was a coin toss at the time.
My first job was in a factory and then in the Army, I didn’t have a plan or wants other than stable living situation and enough money for basic bills.
Like I can imagine a whole set of specific examples where “there are also advantages” would be incredibly offensive to say so handwavily. If someone tried to tell a teenager their experience with being sexually abused as a prepubescent child “has advantages” I would promptly try to remove that person from being near that or any other child for example.
Are there any good books on this topic that you would recommend? I don't expect you to write a point-by-point rebuttal to every blog post like this that comes along, but I'd sure love to do some of that work myself and well-regarded popular books on the subject are a good place to start.
The Amazon results from a search on "books about systemic issues in inner city public schools" are all over the place. Bonus points if you have a more left-leaning recommendation, because I'm already familiar with the arguments from Lukianoff, Haidt, Sowell, et al and would like to read a good counter to them.
Cptsd, parentification, and physical/emotional/social neglect (abuse too, but it’s more obvious than neglect) are the biggest things to solve based on my lived experiences.
Solving those would solve most of the “school” issues I believe.
The next level would be at the “nickeled and dimed” [0] level. Poor opportunities and little mobility is all most of these kids can look forward to. So instead they spend their downtime distracting themselves from how shitty their lives are or will be.
The chaos I had was mostly at home. School was my calm place.
I strongly disagree with this. I don't know if it is genuinely true in a biological sense, but in my life experience it is not even close to true. There are lots of things I do that are so far beyond my abilities as a teenager. It could be due to other factors, but my gut suggests those other factors are much more important than this comment about mere brain power leads us to believe.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4906299/
You weren't an idiot as a teenager. You were just uneducated and inexperienced.
Personally, my decaying mental performance over the years is almost palpable. I feel like I am half-dead now compared to who I was 20 years ago. Sure I was nuts due to the powerful emotions, but that just means I was alive, not a talking corpse that I am now.
Brain morphology is irrelevant. "Development" might just mean aging. Measurable performance is all that matters.
It's always struck me as funny when people say 25 is when you're fully mature. After this point, you start to experience declines in ability. It's not maturity; it's the moment you start dying.
None of it is worth paying attention to.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/big-break...
It's analogous to athletics. Sure, you can have a talent for running. But you're not going to win races unless you train.
A mind is plastic, adaptable, and hence can be trained.
In particular, I think the author makes the mistake of believing everyone must be a creator. The reality is most people aren’t good at it, don’t like it and don’t pursue it. And that is OK.
It also underestimates how young 14 really is, and how much still needs to be learned in general, not just in school but in life.
The difference between 14 and 18 is a vast chasm.
I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets. Maybe some of that is my bad, but I switched to keys after highschool and when I show up to jam, most wind players seem like musical cripples without a lead sheet, and my fakesheets of just chord sequences and important hits are not sufficient for them.
Part of it is just the nature of the Program (wind band is a highly synchronized large group activity and you cant have too much screwing around), but I also think the nature of a wind instrument where you have limited endurance and can only play one note at a time is stunting without proper instruction. Despite having great sense of rhythm and phrasing, I don't think I really understood music until I started getting chord shapes into my hands on the piano and could noodle without worrying about spending my limited endurance.
edited to add: And to be clear I do think the music programs are Good and Valuable. It's an excellent group activity and kids will work on something for months for the big concert. I did not have any other single school project with that kind of runtime and that's a valuable experience on its own.
tldr if your kid likes music dont let them settle for just wind band. Get them a guitar or a piano too. But it's fine to just like the band for what it is, too.
This is pretty much how music is taught to all students learning 'classical' and was my experience as well. Most never really learn anything about music at a fundamental level, and can even have an entire career in the classical world not really knowing anything about what's going on in the music. Random story, but one night here in NYC I got asked by someone to bring out a visiting musician from Spain to hear some music, who had been playing in a major symphony there since the 80s (can't remember if it was Barcelona Symphony or Spanish National Orchestra). Brought him to Smalls in the West Village to catch whoever was playing that night. He was really impressed, kept on leaning over asking "how is that piano player doing that with no sheet music???". It's just not part of a regular classical musician's training, unless they're working to be a composer as well.
But back to your point, I felt the same way with music in my schools growing up. No one ever taught you how to actually play music, they just gave you sheet music and said "play this". It wasn't until much later that I started working with a jazz teacher privately that I got introduced to all the chords, scales/modes, and theories that'd you need to improvise or play music with others. Honestly, I probably would have been better off in high school if someone had told me to drop music classes altogether, handed me a bass or guitar or synth, and said go have fun with a few friends in a garage.
Any exam is done without a music sheet, music theory always include composition. Chord progressions comes surely later in music theory but harmony is key from classic repertoire,and counterpoint from baroque era repertoire.
And let's not forget that a lot of 'classical' musicians back in the day were expected to be able to improvise as well. There's just a different priority for a 'classical' performer these days and a 'jazz' performer.
Without commenting on the dire state of music (and arts) education in the schools, the same is true of all subjects. Mathematics is mostly taught as syntactic manipulation; physics as memorizing a bunch of "laws" and doing "experiments" that have a right or wrong answer (chemistry and biology are even worse in this regard) and so on. Even literature and history are not taught as an exploration and inquiry of possible themes but as structured topics (often one per book) that you learn as being "right" or "wrong".
The emphasis on testing, and in particular standardized testing, has made this worse, since teachers who don't "teach to the test" are often penalized.
> teach to the test
How are you going to teach to the test when the test has questions like: "what is the sum of 647 and 296?"
> standardized testing
There's nothing cultural about math and science. Standardized testing is the only way to objectively measure progress and mastery of them.
That's an excessively reductio view of the practice of science, and frankly dangerous. I think you know better than that. I mean, is newtonian mechanics "right" or "wrong"? It can't always give you the right answer, yet we do teach it and we should.
Most science is working on the edge of what is known. The idea that there are "right" and "wrong" answers in practical science is what has supported peoples' belief that "hey, I heard of someone getting the vaccine and yet they got sick anyway -- what a scam!" or "Scientists said not to bother with a mask but to wash hands furiously, and now they want us to wear masks -- they don't know anything".
The reason I put "experiment" in quotation marks is a lot of "experimentation" in high school is at the level of "pour the solution from the bottle into a beaker, put a strip of litmus paper in, and record the pH." Everybody uses the same bottle of solution so there's one correct answer. That is not "experimentation" that is simply practicing a lab procedure.
"Experimentation" is open ended, and involves debugging. "Make a solution that has a pH of 7.2. How did you determine that? What attempts did you make and what went wrong." Or "reproduce the Millikan oil-drop experiment. What's the charge of the electron? How did it compare to Millikan's result and why?"
The "science is about facts" attitude is a pernicious meme in the public consciousness. It's just as bad as the deterministic teaching of history.
That even holds true for everything but the smallest of jazz combos. Could you imagine listening to a group of 20 musicians all playing from Fake Books? It would be a mess of noise.
What do you mean by "need"? I think, for the purpose of playing music, music theory is more useful than reading. But no one really needs to do music in the first place. It's recreation and fun and expression.
20 musicians can work together. They'd need to know how to listen and make space.
And have you ever tried to get 50 kids to do the same thing for five minutes? Even if that thing is sitting still, it's virtually impossible. If it's playing a song at the limit of their musical ability? You'd have a better time swallowing a shovel.
I also played brass, for what it's worth, but never felt limited by breath endurance. I was a ~5:00 mile runner as a 12 year-old, though.
I wouldn't doubt if learning guitar or piano would help with this aspect, but I know plenty of people who learned it just fine on wind instrument if they want to. It's not too surprising especially for those learning wind instruments - taking a solo in high school is already scary for a lot of people, and even more so when they don't even have music to play or practice ahead of time. Also there is admittedly probably a higher barrier of entry to improv on wind instruments so a lot of the focus necessarily has to be on achieving a baseline technical proficiency before it even makes sense to think about improv (if they don't put in the prerequisite technical work, it would be hard to move to improv). For example, with guitar or piano, right off the bat I can play any note in tune and sound at least halfway okay. On a wind instrument, even playing the most basic note will sound quite bad at first, and generally the range of frequency is limited for beginners and learning to extend it can take many years. Playing in tune likewise takes years.
Anyway, all that said, I entirely agree, if someone really likes music, it's hard to go wrong with also learning guitar or piano. Piano in particular, as one of the most versatile instruments, used in so many genres, and can help with learning fundamental theory, composition, and even gives a very good sense of rhythm as the two hands have to act independent of each other in a way that other instruments normally don't have to. If I had to go back and learn a different instrument, piano would be a likely candidate.
This pretty much says it all right here. The author comes from an incredibly privileged background and clearly believes they are smarter than people who have spent their lives studying education.
How we educate children isn't a perfect system, but educators really are trying to teach important information to all students, including figuring out ways to reach children with very different learning styles, and are stuck balancing what's important with the crap forced on them by legislatures, parents, and (hopefully) well-meaning people like the author.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/us/reading-teaching-curri...
https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/2/14/23598696/nyc-teachers-coll...
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama have went from laughing stocks to already middle of the pack nationally by dumping the new system and going back to phonics
https://apnews.com/article/reading-scores-phonics-mississipp...
https://www.educationnext.org/stubborn-myth-learning-styles-...
Here is a Tedx Talk about those studies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=855Now8h5Rs
This is one of the studies (that with citations to many dubunking studies) that I was assigned in my M.Ed program:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1539-6053.20...
the rational adult in me want to to believe you and hoping the current crop of teachers really have started changing it up.
the part of me that still remembers what school was actually like would vehemently disagree. it took 8 years of deprogramming AFTER highschool before I really started to get my shit together and start to work on a path to success.
Eg try to become an apprentice to someone talented. This would indeed be extremely valuable to anyone trying to learn a skill. The author then goes to great lengths giving advice on how to land a position like that when young.
Parents love to think that because they have had one child (or maybe a couple), they know how to educate children writ large. Compounding that, most people went through the education system as students, so they believe they have insider knowledge as to how the system works. Usually their advice on how to fix the system is geared toward fixing the frustrations they personally felt as a student.
In reality, most people are only exposed to the education system as consumers, and therefore know next to nothing about how it actually works. Doesn't stop them from spouting off what they think they know on internet forums and blogs though. They enjoy pointing out what they see as problems, and are happy to offer quick fixes born in ignorance that have either already been tried and don't work, or don't solve the problem for reasons obvious to people currently working on it. Or better yet, the supposed problem isn't one at all, but a boogeyman that politicians are currently pushing to scare voters.
If you want to fix education, get into the mix and actually help. Sitting on the sidelines complaining isn't helping anyone. If your perspective about the education system is along the lines of "people who can't, teach", as seems to be in vogue these days, then you're really part of the problem.
Was this real, or a new form of draft dodging?
The Army had psychologists look into to this, and it was determined that it wasn't faking. The young men really had poor reading skills.
And the interval between 1945 and 1950 was, backing up till the 20 year olds were 5 or 6 years old, the time when sight reading was first introduced into schools in a big way.
Now, English spelling is more complex than many other languages, but there are maybe 100 rules that cover the overwhelming majority of cases.
I'm not appealing to authority, I'm appealing to evidence/experience versus ignorance and Big Important Feelings. As a scholar and an educator, I'm the first person to say how important it is to cite your sources and to argue from evidence.
So if you're going to write 12,000 words about how the education system sucks and how to get through it, wouldn't you say that some of those words should be devoted to citations? Or at least the recitation of facts? Or barring that, at least establishing the background of the author to dispense such advice? Is a single citation asking too much?
There is one external authority cited in this entire 30 page blog post: Paul Graham. I guess that really says it all though, doesn't it? 14 year olds don't know who Paul Graham is. It really tells me the intended audience of this is not 14 year old kids, but for HN.
I read this and was expecting /s but apparently not.
Please address something concrete! In the US, there are significant problems with the educational system. It's ok to write a theoretical piece thinking about ways to do things differently.
The author has some good ideas that do not deserve to be dismissed lightly. They can even be applied within an existing educational system. Examples that I think should resonate on HN:
- 1C: Produce Instead Of Consuming
- 1D: Do Real Things, Not Fake Things
So really, I'm left to assume that this is just a letter from the author to his past self. That's how this reads to me.
As for the concrete advice you list, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Saying something like "get a computer" or "make a thing" will play great here on HN. But this is not advice 14 year olds want or need. Kids are creating things all the time. You do not have to tell them to create things. In fact, telling a 14 year old that they need to get a computer to before they can produce shows a distinct lack of understanding of how 14 year old express themselves creatively. Most of the advice in that section is focused on how to find a cheap computer, not how to create anything.
If you actually listen to the problems kids have today, it's not that they have a lack of creative outlets. The problems they are facing revolve around managing mental health issues, and there's not a single word about that in all the 12,000+ written.
--
The other thing going on is the generic HN discussion on education the blog post has catalyzed. The blog post doesn't really touch on the discussion happening here, so it's kind of separate, but still related. Here on HN, the discussion often revolves around the Big Important Feelings posters have about the education system. You're right, there are problems, but they are rarely identified here. The solutions offered therefore often aim to solve the wrong problems.
For example, a lot of HN posters have a problem with the number of administrators employed at universities, and they even like to cite a ratio of admin to students or admin to faculty. Then they say "They ratio is too high! Fire the administrators!"
This is a classic example of Chesterton's Fence. Firing the administrators and hiring more faculty seems like a great idea from the perspective of the student, who interacts with faculty and not administrators. But from my perspective as a member of the faculty, I would not want this at all and it would make my work and the work of my students harder (for many reasons I have articulated in previous comments if you're interested in those).
For the HN crowd, this is like saying "The computer is running too many processes. It looks like a lot of those are daemons and system processes, so let's get rid of the operating system to free up resources. That way we can run more programs, because after all, that's the point of the computer." The average HN poster will immediately see 100 reasons why that's a bad idea in a computer system, but then go to advocate for something very similar in principle when it comes to the education system.
Many people practice teaching in a variety of settings. Their demonstrated ability has little correlation with their credentials.
If someone gets stuck on an amateur plumbing or construction project, they call a professional. In other words, the professional competence is trivially demonstrable and applicable. Can you imagine needing a credentialed teacher to get you out of a bind?
> they believe they have insider knowledge as to how the system works.
Although the average person may be incorrect about how to fix it. It's not a good sign that almost everyone leaves with the feeling that something is deeply wrong and almost any alternative would make more sense.
> because they have had one child
Merely being exposed to more examples isn't data, you also need superior methodology. Even in educational academic studies you will find a lot to be desired in this regard.
The people I know who are most vocal about education have many children (4-8+). And they put their money where their mouth is and homeschool. Also, their children tend to grow up with a wide variety of personalities and lifestyles.
> get into the mix and actually help
The system is designed to remove autonomy and responsibility from teachers. They are overwhelmed by curriculum, and program mandates from school, district, and state. The best teachers I had were essentially opted out. A few completely donated their time and refused to participate in any school trainings or events outside their classroom.
The best way I can see to get involved is probably to advocate for vouchers and organize teaching in your neighborhood.
Incredible hubris to say such a thing, after we all went through a pandemic, during which teachers were expected to risk their lives and actually sacrificed their lives in service of keeping their communities running. That's all I have to say to you.
Teachers apparently need to be told, because they spend YEARS teaching kids how to do arithmetic on paper instead of handing out calculators and focusing on high-level mathematical modeling instead. There are lots of such insanities in the curriculum, not to mention loads of propaganda (not a US citizen, but AFAIK there is a lot of propaganda in US schools too).
What I don't understand, though, is why you're not providing this very compelling evidence along with your comment.
They don't care about how to educate children writ large. They care to the extent that they think you are failing their child, specifically. You would do well to remember that as an educator, you have a responsibility to the public. If you really find parents concerns to be beneath your dignity, perhaps you shouldn't be a teacher.
As a person who does tech work, you are now sentenced to be forced to listen to every single asshole who wants to tell you their "super awesome app" idea that "should take like a weekend right" to make and "will get us rich", and you aren't allowed to complain or point out how they have no idea what they are talking about
In my capacity as a citizen of this country and as a taxpayer, I also don't care about busybody "concerned parents" who feel the system is failing them personally. My concern in this capacity comes down to how the system is building a better community for everyone. Individual parental concerns shouldn't turn into culture wars.
The problem is teaching is los pay and low status in most places, and as such mostly attracts people who are terrible teachers.
Our kids are in private school now because our public school is a dumpster fire of bad teachers and admins. The private school teachers don’t get paid a lot but they are valued and highly motivated to actually reach kids. The difference is astounding.
And the private school teachers aren’t doing anything exotic or difficult. They are teaching just like kids were taught decades ago. Heck, my fifth grader is learning Latin.
If I were to speculate, I suspect the differences are:
1. Modestly higher pay in the private school, attracting better teachers
2. More selective student body in the private school, making the school environment more conducive to learning for average and above-average students, and more attractive to teachers
3. No public-sector union in the private school, leading to more accountability for teachers
The second point is important. Private schools exclude all the kids whose parents lack the motivation, time, or resources to place their child in an exclusive institution. They exclude the children who didn't learn the behavioral skills to conform to the expectations of a private school. They exclude many children with disabilities even if they can't explicitly discriminate. Meanwhile, public schools are required to include children with disabilities (often involving disruptive behavior) in class with other students to the extent practical.
Public schools are charged with upholding the social contract that all children are entitled to a Free Appropriate Public Education regardless of their social status, wealth, disability, or the financial or emotional capacity of their parents. It's a heavy burden to carry, but it's one that we as a society have decided is worth the cost. Your children's private school doesn't carry that burden.
> Our kids are in private school now because our public school is a dumpster fire of bad teachers and admins. The private school teachers don’t get paid a lot but they are valued and highly motivated to actually reach kids. The difference is astounding.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. You have N=1 child, and you extrapolate everything from that one child, especially how to teach all children. Your fifth grader is in fifth grader for a single year, and so your experience on fifth graders is limited to that. The teacher teaches 20-30+ new fifth graders every year, for decades, and has a wide range of experience.
I'm sure your fifth grader is very smart and talented. To be learning Latin in 5th grade, they must be. And so what has happened to their old classroom at public school? That classroom is now absent one of the brightest, most engaged members of that community. I'm not saying you were wrong to change schools, that was a good move for you. But for the teacher, you made their job actually harder. And think about what happens when all the top students sort themselves into the top private schools. Where does that leave the public classroom?
This is why your experience was night and day. Take all the top students and put them in a room together, and the learning happens almost automatically. It's like magic. Take all the bottom performers and put them in a room together, and it's like pulling teeth. It's torture.
So yeah, in some sense you're right. Teaching people who want to learn isn't all that hard. It's actually a lot of fun! But that's not all there is to teaching, and so I would implore you to maybe adjust your perspective to account for this.
See https://thetab.com/us/2017/04/10/which-major-has-highest-iq-...
educators are garbage because they don't work empirically, they experiment on kids and the experiments have been failing since the 60s, causing mass amounts of fatherlessness but none of them are even willing to see themselves as the issue because no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible
It's been more than 20 years since I left high school and I've had a very good career and life despite having no degrees and a piss-poor high school GPA, because ultimately none of that actually matters in the real world. All that matters is who you know and whether you can do the job. If you know people who will give you a chance and you can actually succeed at the job, you'll do fine. Learning actual skills that other people care about and value is far more important than being able to regurgitate bullshit for a test to get a piece of paper that's meaningless. My only real regret is that I didn't just drop out of high school and get my GED so I could focus more time on my side-projects at the time.
Reminds me of the quote "the A students lead the C students, who are the bosses of the B students"
For example, you found tech certifications to be valuable to you, and indicated a GED was valuable as well.
Sounds like quite a privilege.
Cool. And?
Yep, I was privileged to have a computer at home and family members who worked at a university so I could get a dial-up SLIP Internet connection and access to Usenet and IRC.
So what. How is that even a remotely useful response to my comment?
Especially this: Make sure you aren’t just doing a glorified version of trying to earn good grades.
So many people failed on this, mostly because of parents. Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless.
Just small nitpick to #1
Learning just in time =/= learning via practice
Learning just in case, the opposite of JIT makes sense too, but is "unpredictably effective" - the stuff you learned may be needed and put you ahead, but may not.
I'd add something about living your own life (career, relations, hobby) instead of being "locked" by your friends. Dont go to X school just because your friends go there.
Friendships decrease/end too. You may barely see them 5 years later due to... life
They aren't worthless.
Grades make it easier and cheaper for you to go to college. Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher paying jobs or grad school.
So not worthless, just not the be all and end all.
Nearly everyone is much better off doing other things with their time than studying to try to get an elite college for a good deal.
There's little evidence that where you go to school matters.
If you take Albert Einstein and you put him in a community college, he's still going to be Albert Einstein, and you're still going to just be you at Harvard.
That's not quite true. There is little evidence that if you go to Penn instead of Penn State you have different results, but there are caveats. First, you have to be able to get into both.
[edit]The studies control for selection, so the ones showing no increase in wages are studying the same cohort at Penn and Penn State, but there are more students at Penn State that are not members of that cohort than there are students at Penn.
Second, you need to go to a college with enough people and have access to a similar cohort of intelligent, hard-working and advantaged students.
>If you take Albert Einstein and you put him in a community college, he's still going to be Albert Einstein, and you're still going to just be you at Harvard.
Maybe so - most people aren't Albert Einstein, though, and that Harvard degree gets you a look at places where the community college degree does not.
In Louisiana, it literally gets you a free public college education.
Grades are terrible due to bias, difficulty when it comes to comparing them and lack of transparency.
At best they show effort (or "caring" parents)
>Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher
Thats why there should be fair and transparent exam after college :)
This way everything is up to your score, not school name or cool prof who inflates grades
I prefer wholistic evaluations. You are more than both your test scores and your grades and your school and your demographics. But if you put them all together one can get a decent picture.
Basically, high grades aren't the end-all, be-all of school. They aren't a way of defining ones' worth. The analogy of treating school like a job really applies here. TFA also points out the risk of bad grades.
I should point out that TFA's advice works for conventional high school, but less for prep school. I had so much homework in prep school that it was nearly impossible for me to pursue the kinds of things TFA advocates for. Had I known better, I would have insisted on going to public school. (But all my friends were going to prep school; another mistake from TFA that I fell into.)
>So not worthless, just not the be all and end all.
It was a reply to someone who missed the point about the discussion on grades.
How do they make it cheaper to go to college?
Merit scholarships that are based mostly or entirely on grades are relatively rare and extremely competitive.
And the cheapest colleges are often the least selective ones (like community college or state schools).
Personally I was able to skip a full semester and change of classes thanks to taking every AP course I could during high school as well
Many programs and scholarships have grade cutoffs or maintenance requirements and while scholarships aren't entirely based on grades the grades are often a prerequisite.
I have this archetype which I constructed over the years, that I named "34-year-old Patrice".
By just looking at him, you wouldn't be able to tell that 34yo Patrice dropped out of high school, took some odd jobs in his youth which eventually got him into trouble, so he did time. At age 26 he got out and started turning his life around and despite all this hardship is currently a functional member of society and in some regards even more successful than his peers.
Point being, life is more complex than just taking and passing tests. I feel like more teenagers should be told this as early as possible.
One of my middle school teachers observed with chagrin that I would rush my classwork, accepting a high B or low A when they were sure I could have gotten a 100% if I had "tried", so that I could go back to reading my book. Unfortunately, there was no reward for a 90 vs a 100 (beyond buffer to your overall grade being an A), so I just did as little as possible to get the maximum reward out of the system, and then went back to doing what I liked to do - learning.
It's also a bit funny to me that the program that was ostensibly supposed to support kids like me - "Future Problem Solvers" if I recall the name right - rejected me because they test they administered to determine if I should be invited was extremely weird to me - I mostly remember it asking me to, given a set of random lines, draw a picture using them. I think I mostly turned them into smiley faces because I was bored and confused by what they wanted. I'm sure, in retrospect, that they wanted me to show creativity in making interesting art out of the "constraints" of the lines. But alas, I just wanted to get back to reading what (given my age) was probably a book about space or a CS Lewis book or something. My best friend got in, and he ended up dropping out of college after 2 semesters of drinking, so I guess maybe it wasn't a very good program anyway.
This is also a place to tailor things. If you are particularly good at learning ahead of time, then you can learn a lot of things "just in case" at a low cost, increasing the chances that something you learned is useful.
If you aren't especially good at it, then you're going to have much lower chances and JIT learning makes sense for all the reasons in TFA
> Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless.
I'd like everyone who makes this claim to try submitting resumes of a fresh college graduate with a low C average to a dozen companies and see if even a single one of them calls back.
Grades are a means to an end, which is different than being worthless.
Even better - Ive found my first software job during 1st year and nobody asked me about grades, but this is not US.
Learn your stuff, have interesting stuff in CV and it should be doable, right?
At e.g. a college job fair, not having the GPA on the resume jumps out immediately and the recruiter would ask me for my GPA and write it on the resume if it wasn't there. With the GPA on my resume, I had several recruiters say "You might want to save this for another company because we aren't calling you back with that GPA" and hand me my resume back. This included, with zero exceptions, every SV company at the CS job fair at my college.
After the first job, you are much less likely to be asked for GPA, but it does still occasionally happen.
Weirdest (right out of college) interview was where I had gone through all the stages, including a multi-hour on-site, they were talking salary range, specific roles, and when I could start, but then they had to fill out a form for HR. The dialogue was roughly:
Interviewer: You're coming right out of school, right?
Me: Yes
I: Okay, I need your GPA
M: 2.2
I: Oh. (long pause, looked very uncomfortable) alright then.
They suddenly switched from being obviously ready to hire me to perfunctorily filling out the form.
I would have been doomed without an external setting where I got to interact with much more qualified people.
And schools also function in part as day care. Parents can devote hours of the day to work, focused and without worry for their child. If all parents had to bring their children to work, would that not diminish their ability to work?
Can an electrician focus on his work when a young child is with him? How can he teach the child the theory of electrophysics that is necessary to understand if one is to become an electrician? Do others at the site watch the children and explain the theory? Would you then not end up with teachers again?
Edit: This is also a rather amerocentric take. What of other countries educational systems where you can choose more directional high schools. Where the final year of highschool IS an apprenticeship in some vocation? Where you leave school, with no debt and with experience on the job. And all the countries where education is free. Countries where relevant experience is a part of the degree? Where courses in teamwork, leadership and other skills are a part of higher education? To discard educational systems because of the defects of a single country's defects seems poorly thought out.
Yes, of course. This doesn't mean a 4 year old is coming along on a traditional 8 hour US electrician's shift. It doesn't mean the 10 year old is coming along to the dangerous industrial jobs. When kids get put into reasonable contexts they adapt, it's kind of what we excel at as a species.
However, I was absolutely learning how to do basic home wiring (at a semi-useful level for some tasks) and electrical theory before I was in my double digits in years. By the time I was 10 or 11 (hard to recall precisely) I was wiring up my own circuits (alarm on my door to not be caught reading at night) at home and doing dangerous things with line current. I certainly knew enough to be dangerous, but also did understand the basics of how AC and DC circuits worked.
To this day I can still do basic electrical work such as bending conduit, wiring in work boxes - essentially everything past the demarc. These were all skills I learned before I was a teenager by helping out on job sites.
> How can he teach the child the theory of electrophysics that is necessary to understand if one is to become an electrician? Do others at the site watch the children and explain the theory? Would you then not end up with teachers again?
How many working electricians understand things to such a deep level? While I certainly understand more these days than I did at age 12, I can't really say any of it would be useful on a typical residential job site. The safety aspect is pretty well handled by a few standard rules of thumb that don't require much deep theory-level knowledge.
I'm very much not anti-school, but anyone who thinks our current system remotely challenges most individuals seems to have an incredible lack of imagination to me. Yes, this requires far more effort from far more adults across the entire spectrum of society.
Edit: All I do know is that sequestering kids away from 'real life' is damaging, and I'm unsure anything can convince me otherwise at this point in my life. We can never go back in time and give someone those experiences later in life (brains stop making neural connections as quickly) so I do often ponder what is truly being lost forever.
Yes. This is one of the outcomes the anti-school crowd is after.
Not today. Schools no longer have monopoly on education. They actually prevent kids from learning by overloading them with the official curriculum, leaving no time or energy for informal education.
How would this new setup allow me to become something other than what is immediately around me?
There's nothing "default" about Civilization, which entailed intentional centralization and creation of bureaucracy.
We don't live in a society where 80% of people farm shitty land to survive, and no one of sound mind wants to turn back that dial. We're not bringing our kids to roam sheepishly around oil rigs, mines, labs, sales floors, whatever.
I think everyone has an opinion on how education could improve, but there's no superior (or viable) substitute for it at scale.
Notwithstanding, this isn't zero sum in the first place: parents can teach their kid at leisure, and they do. They expose them to their interests and their work, to some extent.
And lastly, there's no such thing as "absent from life". Even if this is only meant to convey the idea that schooling shelters kids away from any and all interesting things in society, this is untrue (and by extension, it would suggest that you're "absent from life" if your shit job doesn't meet some arbitrary criteria, or otherwise that your shit job is "full of life" but school isn't).
I'm not aware of anyone in the US going into to debt for school before the age of 18.
Are you confusing the free public education that's offered throughout the US with the optional college education that some, though definitely not most, take out loans to attend?
You are limited to your sorroundings with less ways to move up due to lack of awarness
I bet it would increase inequality hard
I would sprinkle this around the school calendar so that you had a few weeks a year where you could sit at various places of work and see what was going on, instead of little weeklong academic breaks plus a mega long summer holiday. Not everyone loves the academic side of things and this could be a good break, plus it might provide some motivation for the question of "why am I learning this" that everyone has at various points in their education.
I would think of it as 'take your kids to work', but more often. I am not a big fan. I was coming to my dad's car shop after school and I can't honestly say that I learned anything useful ( I could have, but did not ).
In this case, he had a certain amount of records to print in the time allotted, and he needed two operators to make the window. I learned a lot of useless knowledge about which medical procedures qualify for extra reimbursement for Medicare, and also what Sunset Park, Queens looked like at 3am. Nothing really useful in life.
I think if my dad had hired someone and let me sleep and play on the computer instead, that probably would have turned out better for me.
I think these were called apprenticeships at one time
What if you have some soul-crushing dead-end office job? How long do you think a 6-year-old would last in an airline customer support call center?
For getting into top-ranked colleges, "the summer business I started in HS is already paying me more than your median graduate's full-time job" is a slam-dunk argument.
No. It's really not. As someone who has been involved in the system that admits you to top ranked universities and whose summer hustle also paid well in highschool. This is not a slam dunk. It's one small piece. And it could easily backfire and be a negative depending on how you write it. For example by writing it as if it's a slam dunk.
These sort of overt economic arguments tend to go over very poorly.
(OTOH, I wouldn't call it a "summer hustle" when you've paid your CPA more for routine tax prep than any of your peers have earned before graduating. Hopefully yours was similarly lucrative.)
An example of your point - another old friend had a nephew who was an "obvious" candidate for an Ivy / Stanford / etc. on academics, etc., etc. The nephew was also an out-of-the-closet white supremacist, both online and in his application essays. Zero offers, even from third-tier schools.
If they don't even try to convince you, you should probably stick with your business.
For someone invoking BATNA, I would hope you understood the concept of distributive bargaining.
Top universities get lots of good candidates. The lawn care business guy - he's just one of them. The school doesn't lose much if he doesn't go there, and thus he is not worth that much of the school's time.
That MSc at least helped tremendously with branding - people could lay their trust in that when he was still starting out.
For one, they aren't involved in admissions at all.
Their goal is to make long term relationships so that both sides, the donors and the university get something out of it. Not to judge people based on where their money or connections come from.
Depending on how big the trust fund is, I think you'll find it will open more doors than a summer lawncare initiative.
that'd be a good argument too. why go to college if you have income security? go do something infinitely more interesting and fulfilling
> college isn’t doing a good job of setting you up to succeed in real life
Many colleges, especially the prestigious ones, would explicitly deny that as their goal as being too vocational is dismissed for reasons of class history
Perhaps we should start with putting some trust in the people who are close to the age of majority.
High school is not daycare in any shape or form. Highschoolers can largely fend for themselves. Of course they get ideas, but you consistently see less of that when there's trust and mutual respect in place.
Honors, AP, IB are not daycare.
I'd agree that for these students HS shouldn't be a daycare, but that doesn't mean it isn't the prevailing attitude amongst current administrators. Piling on a bunch of extra memorization work doesn't mean they're treating students as independent thinkers.
When people in my class started turning 18 teachers reminded us that compulsory education doesn't apply to them any more, so they're free to leave at any time - with appropriate consequences regarding their chances of passing, but nothing else.
These days I live in silicon valley and my wife's family sponsors a bunch of projects at the montessori school they've attended for multiple generations, but I grew up in a small town in Texas where parents (and teachers) beat children for asking questions the adults don't know how to answer. This is advice to help people who are already in a good position get into an even better position. If you're born at the bottom, using existing institutions, which are consistent and safe, to escape to a better place might be the best you can hope for. "Getting your friends together and busking" sounds great if you have money to buy instruments and free time to learn how to play them and sane supportive parents who are supportive of that, and that might make you stand out on your ivy league application if you manage to record and self-publish something. But a school marching band gives you an instrument, and schedules time for you to practice during the school day, and is a verifiable piece of experience that a state university will probably recognize even if you don't win any form of competition. So I don't consider this post to be good advice generally for the masses. And as long as bad parents are allowed to give their children bad childhoods and bad communities are allowed to treat children like property en masse, this advice will be counterproductive for a pretty significant portion of society.
> Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence, or far too many students for the teachers to pay any individual attention to; or, relatedly, maybe you’re required to spend a lot of time caring for siblings or parents, working a low-skill job, or holding your family together or preserving your safety in some way.
Oh if only not being extremely privileged was so easy to undo. When you work a lot of jobs to keep your family together you don't have time for alternative highschool guides. That's why people talk about companies being founded in garages and not on the street in Chicago.
I've had students who never got a good night of sleep in their lives. Or students with abusive family.
People who don't come from privileged backgrounds also cannot see themselves doing a lot of the careers related to this guide.
> It might be easier to talk teachers into letting you off the busywork for their classes
It's exactly the opposite. The idea that something is busywork and you tell a teacher you're going to do something else instead is privilege. Those teachers they're massively overworked and underpaid. They don't have time for this nonsense.
> Your charm advantage gets increased a little bit in this situation; if you reach out to an adult doing some sort of interesting work.
Seeing the author's reaction to being contacted by a student who doesn't talk they way they do, might have a tattoo, might dress very differently, would be interesting. No. Being poor and I'm bad conditions is not charming.
I'm guessing you're a teacher? If so, I'd be curious to hear more about your experience and thoughts on what strategies work best for teenagers in economically/socially/geographically disadvantaged situations. Do you follow the post-school life trajectories of any former students? Do any manage to achieve upward mobility (this could look like the "homeless to Harvard" human interest story you hear every year, but it could also look like someone who goes from a childhood of abuse or abject poverty to a relatively stable blue-collar job and is safer and happier as an adult than as a child)? What advice would you give to a fourteen-year-old student?
This isn't to say that there aren't massive obstacles in their way (especially for the ones who have to devote all their time to securing basic needs like food/shelter/sleep), or that their circumstances are their fault, or that systemic change wouldn't be a more powerful lever. What I'm wondering is, assuming you're a kid in this situation and you don't have a hand on the lever of institutional power, is there anything you can do beyond the standard "stay in school" advice to improve your circumstances, even if the improvement is just from "very bad" to "kind of bad"?
> People who don't come from privileged backgrounds also cannot see themselves doing a lot of the careers related to this guide.
What careers do the students you know typically aspire to? Or are they usually resigned to the prospect of an unfulfilling job?
> preserving your safety in some way
Even a comment as small as this is assuming a lot in poor areas. The only safety I had was in my own head or in my STEM classes because I could immerse myself in them enough to forget about life outside them.
Look up the problems associated with complex-ptsd, childhood neglect and parentification.
It was all about racing as hard as possible away from where I was, not about looking forward in any way. For most of my twenties my timeframe in planning was weeks or months if I felt confident.
I just got lucky I got hooked on computers and had a couple teachers that praised me for that and math.
In fact, I nearly dropped out in 9th grade to work at a Burger King so I had access to some kind of money. Instead I called CPS and moved in with my narcissistic mother who was at least financially stable. But it was a coin toss at the time.
My first job was in a factory and then in the Army, I didn’t have a plan or wants other than stable living situation and enough money for basic bills.
They usually aren't looking past whether they will be going to bed hungry that night or not. Seriously man, you come off like a scene from arrested development, like you just have never seen a poor kid in your life, or more importantly, haven't even tried to volunteer at an organization that attempts to help these kids.
Kids these days do not suffer from scarcity of opportunities. They suffer from lack of confidence. They need to gain confidence through little successes. Sending them out into the world doing things way above their current skill level is going to result in confidence-crushing failures.
My son (and our first learner) launched his portfolio (real work, not fake stuff) back in December and he added his new math toy last month. We expect his portfolio (+ his experience, skill and knowledge) to grow over the next couple of years. Here is his Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603838.
I'm sure the tone of the article was meant to be light-hearted + silly + joke-y overall but this is actually interesting to me... Why is that the default? Why do some (most) parents need to actively invest time/resources to make sure their kids do not end up pregnant, in jail, or dead instead of the default being "those are non-issues".
That can be overcome with good parenting, but you don't have to get a license to pop out a brood.
This doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t feel like I really got to peak “raw brainpower” until about 22-23 years old.
> by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there. So you’ve got a four-year chunk during which you’re smart enough to learn anything a novice adult version of you could;
1. This presuppoess that "smart" is the essential ingredient for success. How about maturity/self-discipline? There is no way a 14 year old has the maturity of an 18 year old to deal with learning or doing difficult things.
2. IME a very significant problem that teens have learning is the "fixed mindset". When they are unable to do something right away, especially if they observe their peers can, most don't know how to put in the work to improve. In fact, they behave as if they cannot improve. Concealing one's inability to do something is very common.
The author does bring this up in "4F" but I don't feel like it addresses the problem very well. It postulates an ideal student who will connect with someone who is more motivated than them, but then not just ride their coattails. I don't even see that in the business world.
